


When the Bough Breaks

by brihana25



Category: NCIS
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Child Death, Child Neglect, Drunk Driving, Family, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Mental Anguish, Season/Series 06
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-18
Updated: 2017-09-18
Packaged: 2018-12-31 01:52:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12121965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brihana25/pseuds/brihana25
Summary: A small boy, an absent father, a mother with a drinking problem, and a smashed-up car at the bottom of a hill. Two people were dead, but there was no mystery to solve and no bad guy to catch. Gibbs didn't expect it to be easy on any of them, but what the hell was wrong with DiNozzo? - CURRENTLY ON HIATUS





	When the Bough Breaks

**Author's Note:**

> If you like Senior, you really might want to skip this one. The story has been bouncing around in my brain for years, and I think – even with his "redemption" in later seasons – this version of him could have existed. He doesn't make a real-time appearance, because this is a year before Flesh and Blood, but he is a rather large part of the story. And no matter what you think of him, it's undeniable that he's not what anyone, even Senior himself, would ever consider a "good" father.

_The white Ford sedan traveled down the highway at wildly varying speeds, all of them over the speed limit. The eight-year-old boy in the front passenger seat pushed his light brown hair behind his ears as he watched the familiar scenery pass by in a blur. He swallowed hard, trying not to puke all over himself, and turned away from the window._

_"Can you pull over, Mom? I don't feel good."_

_"No. We're going home." Her words were slow and slurred, but he understood her. He'd heard her talk like that an awful lot._

_"But we ... I mean ... please? I think I'm gonna be ..."_

_"You wanted me to come see your game, didn't you?"_

_For the hundredth time since she'd shown up at the field, yelled at him, cussed and thrown his glove at his coach, dragged him off the field by the back of his jersey, and shoved him in the car, he pretended he couldn't smell it. He pretended he didn't know what she'd been doing all day. He was getting good at pretending. Sometimes, if he tried really hard, he could almost convince himself the make-believe was real._

_"Well, I showed up, didn't I?"_

_"I know, Mom. You did. But can't you just ..."_

_"No!" There was anger in her voice and in her eyes, and he knew he'd put it there, but he couldn't help it. He was scared, so scared, and he just wanted her to pull over. "It's never good enough for you, is it? You get mad if I don't go. You get mad if I do." She turned her head, tried to focus her blurry, half-closed, red-rimmed eyes on him, and as she did, the car began to swerve. "Nothing I do is ever good enough for you!"_

_"Mom, please."_

_"Just like your father," she muttered. "I swear. You're just as bad as he is. Exactly like him."_

_She didn't see the car in the other lane. She didn't see the yellow line in the middle of the road. She didn't see that they were crossing it._

_He did._

_"Mom!"_

_His frantic cry should have startled her, but it didn't. Her eyes, which only seconds before had been flashing in anger, were sliding closed._

_"Mom, wake up!"_

_She should have hit the brakes. She should have stopped the car. She should have done something – anything – to avoid what was about to happen. But her eyes didn't open, and her head tipped forward, and her hands fell away from the steering wheel._

_"Mom!"_

_It was all going too fast. Everything was happening too fast. And he didn't know what was wrong with her, or why she wasn't opening her eyes, or why the car was speeding up, or why the other car wasn't getting out of the way. All he knew was that someone had to drive, and his mom wasn't doing it._

_He tried to unbuckle his seatbelt, but he couldn't get it open. He leaned against it, grabbed the steering wheel with both hands, and yanked it toward him as hard as he could. He heard the blare of the other car's horn grow louder and then fade away as the sedan veered back into its own lane, but a heartbeat later, he knew he'd made a mistake. He'd pulled too hard, too fast, too far. Instead of straightening the car out, he'd turned it. They weren't going to hit the other car, but they were going to hit a guardrail. He tried to push the steering wheel back the other way, but it was too late._

_The tires hit the rocks at the side of the road. The rear of the car kicked out to the side. They were still accelerating, but every spin of the tires only pulled them closer to the edge._

_"No!"_

_And then the world was turning sideways and flipping upside down and everything was happening so fast and he really was going to be sick. The seatbelt he'd half-unbuckled let go, and he was flying, a feeling of weightlessness combined with bouncing violently between the roof and the seat and the dashboard and the door. Loud pops and bangs and shattering glass and screeching metal and the sedan's horn filled his ears._

_He didn't hear himself screaming._

_The world stopped flipping and spinning when the car came to rest upside down on the rocks that lined the deep ditch. He was a crumpled heap on the headliner, blood running down his face, the worst pain he'd ever felt shooting up his arm, crushing his chest and stabbing him in the head. When he did manage to open his eyes, it was only to see he was alone in the car. His mom was gone. He opened his mouth to cry out for her ... and everything went black._

* * *

"You're looking at it all wrong, McEbert."

Tony DiNozzo climbed out of the driver's seat of the MCRT van and closed the door behind him. He walked around the front as Tim McGee and Ziva David exited the other side, and together, the three of them walked to the back of the vehicle to gather their gear.

"I'm not saying that all of Shyamalan's movies are masterpieces or anything, because let's face it, The Happening was dumb. The grass did it? Come on! But Signs ..."

Tim sighed as he pulled open the back doors of the van. Ziva looked back and forth between the two men as they reached in to grab their packs.

"Scientifically unsound," Tim said. "To say nothing of unbelievable. You think homicidal grass is stupid? What about a race of aliens with severe aguagenic uticaria who invade a planet that's 71% water?"

"Agua what?" Ziva stepped between them and grabbed her own bag.

Tim hooked one strap of his backpack across his shoulder and reached back in for a gear box. "They were allergic to water, Ziva. Deathly allergic. As in it was the only thing that could kill them."

"Oh." Ziva stepped back as Tony grabbed the camera, put the strap around his neck, and closed the van. "Yes, if that is true, then they were foolish. Certainly they would have done reconnaissance before they landed and known that ..."

"No. Look at the bigger picture." Tony hurried past them, and then turned to face them again, forcing them to stop by blocking their path. "When it comes to scary, those aliens had it. The one that walks past the camera at the birthday party?" Tony shuddered. "And that creepy hand, out of nowhere. Who sees that coming?"

The sudden blow made him flinch, and the squeal it caused was distinctly undignified. He glanced at Tim and Ziva as he raised a hand to the back of his head, and he wasn't surprised by the matching grins on their faces.

"Shoulda seen that coming," he muttered.

"Ya think, DiNozzo?" 

Tony's own grin, as he turned to face the man, was both sheepish and mischievous. "Your powers of stealth are a thousand times creepier than any alien, Boss." His smile widened as Gibbs' eyes hardened. "I mean that in the best way possible, of course."

Leroy Jethro Gibbs, as was his way, did not rise to the bait. "Move it, DiNozzo," he said as he walked away. "Or a hand coming out of nowhere will be the least of your worries."

The three agents stood on the side of the road as their boss made his way down the hill, avoiding the recently-plowed path of crumpled guardrail, broken trees, laid-over grass, and tire ruts. 

"You're right about one thing, Tony," Tim said. "Shyamalan's got nothing on Gibbs."

"True." Tony smiled again as he started down, following closely in the footprints Gibbs had left in the mud. "The alien hand scares you once, but after that, you know when it's coming. Life with the boss is one jump-scare after another." 

Tim gave Tony a few seconds head start before moving after him. Ziva shook her head at both of them, sighed, and took her place at the end of the single-file line.

The trip down the side of the hill was short, ending only fifteen feet from where they'd started. The small, grey coupe had left the road with some speed, and it appeared to have both rolled and flipped before it slammed to a stop, with its back tires on the ground and its front tires six inches in the air, against the trunk of a dead tree. The call they'd gotten from the local LEOs had told them what to expect: the wrecked car, with a Marine captain's young son dead in the front seat and his wife dead on the ground a few feet away. 

"DiNozzo." Gibbs barely waited for them to reach the car before he began snapping out orders. "Shoot. Ziva, witness. McGee, evidence. Stay back from the car until the wrecker gets here."

Tony lifted the camera and began taking pictures, starting at the rear of the car and working his way around to the left. McGee opened his PDA and moved next to Tony, entering the license plate number to check the registration. Ziva walked back up the hill to where the the woman who'd reported the accident stood with the deputy who'd first responded to it. Gibbs moved slowly around the right side, taking measurements and recreating the scene in a sketchbook as he went.

They worked quietly, soberly, the way they always did when one of their victims was a child. Even Tony had abandoned the silly conversation from earlier, obviously deciding that his usual sense of humor was inappropriate, given the circumstances. There was no banter between the agents, no snarky comments, and for once, Tony didn't throw out a single movie reference, though Gibbs was sure there were several he could have chosen from. 

McGee's PDA beeped when his search of the DMV database turned up a match. "Registration comes back to Captain Daniel Booker." He didn't direct his comments at anyone in particular, but he knew that everyone would hear him. It wasn't new information, but it was independent confirmation of what they'd been told by dispatch. "His service records state he and his wife, Naomi, have been married for eleven years. They have a nine-year-old son named Max."

"Naomi," Tony said softly, looking down at the woman on the ground.

Gibbs took a deep breath and blew it out slowly as he looked through the shattered rear window at the blond-haired child in the front seat. Just as quietly as Tony, he said, "And Max."

Ziva nodded at her team in acknowledgement of the information before turning back to the witness and the deputy. "Please go on, Mrs. Ellis."

The older woman was obviously upset, her face flushed and her breathing shallow. She'd been shaking so badly when Ziva had first walked up to her that the deputy, O'Brien, had made her sit down on one of the fallen trees. "I was just saying that I drive this road every day. I've seen the car before. I think they live near here, but I don't know them. Today ... I don't know what happened. I was driving into town, and I saw them coming up behind me. They were going so fast, and swerving all over the road. I tried to pull over to let them pass, but when I slowed down ... all of the sudden, they just went off the road. I kept thinking they were going to stop, but they kept going, and then it flipped, and ..." Her words were rushed, as though they had to get out, and they'd sped up as she talked. She looked down the hill, in the direction of the car, and tears began welling in her eyes. "That little boy. The poor little angel ..." 

Ducky and Palmer arrived only a few moments later, by which time Tony and Gibbs had both reached the front of the car. Ducky stopped next to the car long enough to reach through the missing window and check the boy for a pulse, but he shook his head quickly and pulled his hand back. "If there is any mercy to be found here, it's only that this happened so quickly he didn't feel anything."

Tony finished the left side, and he shook his head as he walked slowly past Naomi Booker, taking pictures of where she had landed after being ejected through the windshield. Satisfied that he had enough to document her location, and knowing that Palmer would take more detailed photos of the condition of her body, he moved on to photographing the right side of the car. 

Gibbs was taking measurements near the passenger door. He and Tony could both see Max from where they stood. The boy's seatbelt had held, and the airbag had deployed, but the blood on his face and the weird angle of his head said they'd both done more harm than good. Gibbs sensed someone's attention on him, and he looked up. Tony's usually bright and smiling eyes were filled with sadness, and he shook his head slowly. 

"On their way to a soccer game," Tony said softly, and Gibbs tilted his head. 

"What makes you say that?"

Tony nodded in the direction of the front seat. "He's wearing a white soccer uniform, and there's no dirt or grass on it. And they were heading into town, not coming back."

Gibbs thought about that for a second before nodding once in agreement. It probably wouldn't matter much, in the end. No matter where they'd been going, they were never going to get there. Without another word, they both turned back to their appointed tasks.

"Jethro."

Ducky's summons pulled Gibbs' attention to the older man as he stood up from having briefly knelt at the mother's side. 

"What ya got, Duck?"

"I will, of course, know more once we get them back, but I do not expect any surprises." He sighed softly. "The boy died instantly of a broken neck. I anticipate that his mother's cause of death will be multiple traumatic injuries, any number of which would have been immediately fatal." He paused long enough to take a deep breath and let it out. "As for the cause of the accident, I smell alcohol. Quite a lot of it, too. I do not believe there is any mystery here."

From the corner of his eye, Gibbs saw Tony's head shoot up and the camera almost fall from his hands. McGee stood slowly from where he'd been marking pieces of the shattered bumper on the ground behind the car. Ziva's voice faded out as her interview with Mrs. Ellis came to an abrupt halt. 

"She was drunk?" The question was Tony's, uncharacteristically soft, filled with disbelief and an emptiness that Gibbs was at a loss to explain.

"It does appear so, I'm afraid." 

Tony turned his head slowly toward Naomi's body on the ground, then back to Max in the car. He closed his eyes, and his head tipped forward slightly.

Gibbs noticed the odd reaction, but before he could mention it, a series of cracking noises came from the direction of the tree, and the car shifted slightly. Gibbs stepped back and motioned for Ducky and Palmer to do the same. "Keep moving, Ducky," he advised. "Back up the hill. Away from the car." He didn't bother to give the same instruction to Tony, expecting him to have noticed the movement for himself.

Instead of doing as he was told, Ducky began walking back toward Naomi's body. "We should move her before ..."

"No." Gibbs shook his head and took another step back as more cracks and pops sounded, this time accompanied by a slight screech of strained metal. "We wait for the wrecker to get here and stabilize this thing. The way it's moving, it's ..." 

Another crack, much louder than the others, and the car slid forward and down another few inches. The tree was bent at an angle it hadn't been before, and it was obvious the entire thing was about to go. Gibbs turned back toward Ducky, Palmer, and Tim. "Move!" he ordered, pointing up the hill. "Now!"

Gibbs started back up himself, but a shout from Ziva stopped him.

"Tony!"

He spun around, and he was surprised to see that rather than moving away from the car, as he should have been doing, Tony was walking closer to it. He looked as though he were in some sort of trance, and though the screeches and snaps were growing louder with each passing second as the car jerked and jolted forward, he didn't stop. 

"DiNozzo!"

"Tony!"

"Anthony!"

Gibbs, McGee and Ducky shouted in unison, but he didn't seem to hear them. He didn't seem to hear anything. He kept walking forward, every step taking him closer to the front of a car that wasn't going to stay where it was much longer. His eyes, clouded and glazed, were locked on Max in the front seat, and he was shaking his head and muttering to himself. 

"No," he said softly. "She wasn't. She wouldn't. She ..."

"DiNozzo! Get the hell out of there!"

He wasn't listening. The cracks and groans and snaps of the tree and the screeches and screams and tearing metal of the car had risen in pitch and volume, and they'd become a constant soundtrack to the bizarre scene. Tony was standing in front of the right side of the car, staring through the windshield at Max Booker, totally oblivious to the danger he was in.

The car jerked forward again, bringing the bumper within inches of Tony's legs, and there was no more time.

With the echoes of his team's cries ringing in his ears, and his own shout of, "Tony!" still hanging in the air, Gibbs bolted back down the hill. The car was in constant motion, sliding closer to Tony with every second that passed. With one last surge of speed, Gibbs reached Tony, wrapped his arms around his waist, and with a spinning tackle threw them both to the ground. They landed – hard – a foot from the car, just as the tree finally gave up its fight to stay standing under the added weight and strain.

The tree snapped in two. The stump gave way under the increasingly rapid forward momentum of the car, and the rest of it fell to the side. Gibbs saw it coming and, with his arms still around Tony, managed to roll far enough down the hill to avoid being smashed by the trunk, but the ends of the smaller branches still scratched and tore at them. Gibbs grunted against the sudden sting of a hundred tiny cuts, but Tony didn't make a sound. The car continued its plummet until the hill started to level off, and there, it came to a stop on its own.

The sudden silence on the side of the hill was almost as deafening as the thunderous destruction of the last few moments had been.

Gibbs pushed himself up from the ground angrily, grabbing Tony's shoulder and rolling him over as he did.

"Damn it, DiNozzo, what the hell was ...?"

Tony flopped to his back, unresisting. His eyes were closed, and there was blood oozing from a cut on his forehead.

"Ducky!"

Gibbs could hear five sets of feet rushing down the hill toward him. Ziva reached them first, with McGee and Deputy O'Brien right behind her, followed only seconds later by Palmer and Ducky. Ziva, Tim, Palmer and O'Brien started clearing away the broken branches that covered them, and Ducky knelt at Tony's side. After a few seconds, he sat back on his heels and smiled softly.

"Duck?"

"He'll be all right, Jethro," he said. "It's just a bump on the head, not much more than a scratch. He's already coming around."

Almost on cue, Tony's eyes fluttered open. He blinked a few times, then looked up at Gibbs and Ducky kneeling next to him, and the rest of his team and a man he didn't know standing above them. 

"Um … hello," he said hesitantly. "Why am I …?"

"You mind telling me what the hell that was, DiNozzo?" Gibbs' voice was gruff, as always, but there was an overtone of concern that he was certain no one picked up on. A glance across at Ducky told him the older man had heard it, but it wasn't anything he hadn't heard before. "You have a sudden death wish? Because if you do, I could take care of that a lot easier than …"

"What?" Tony's confusion wasn't a show. He appeared to honestly have no idea what had just happened. 

"You were in front of the car when it started going down the hill," McGee said from behind Gibbs' shoulder. 

"You did not get out of the way," Ziva added from where she stood next to Ducky. 

"Long story short," Gibbs said. "You damn near got yourself run over by a car, and I want to know why."

"I don't know what …" Tony turned his head slowly, looking past Gibbs to the car. His eyes glazed over again, and a dozen different emotions flashed across his face. The expression that dominated the last few seconds of the silence was a combination of horror and certainty. 

"The boy's alive!"

Tony bolted up from the ground and pushed himself to his feet before Gibbs or Ducky could stop him. He jumped toward the car, but his knees buckled, and he was on his way right back down. Gibbs stood up, but McGee and Palmer were closer. They caught him, one on each arm, and kept him upright. 

"Whoa," McGee said. "Easy, Tony."

"We have to get him out of the car." Tony sounded so sure that Gibbs found himself checking with Ducky to see if it was even possible. The slow, sad shake of Ducky's head confirmed it wasn't. "He's hurt. Bad. We can't leave him there."

Gibbs caught McGee's attention and jerked his head up the hill. McGee understood the silent command, and he slipped under Tony's right arm.

"Come on, Tony," McGee said easily. "Let's get you back to the car."

He and Palmer turned Tony around and headed back up to the road. Tony kept trying to pull away from them, kept turning his head back toward the car, kept insisting that the boy was alive and they couldn't just leave him. McGee and Palmer were talking to him, their voices low and soothing, though Gibbs couldn't hear what they were saying. Whatever it was, it seemed to work, because Tony finally quit fighting them and let them lead him away.

Gibbs turned to Ziva, O'Brien and Ducky. "Nothing else happens anywhere near that car until the wrecker gets here and secures it. Ziva, you and McGee stay here and finish working the scene. Complete your interview; McGee will handle the evidence collection. Deputy, you can go when the witness is done. There's not much left of the scene, so we'll have to rely on the pictures we got before ..."

"We will take care of everything, Gibbs."

Gibbs nodded at her before turning and following the others up the hill. Ducky followed him, and Gibbs looked back at him over his shoulder. 

"As you explained, Jethro," Ducky said in answer to the unasked question. "The victims have been pronounced, and the scene is destroyed. Mr. Palmer is more than capable of handling the transportation of the bodies without me. I am needed elsewhere for the next short while." 

Climbing the hill was more difficult than walking down it had been, and both men were too occupied with their own thoughts to talk to each other. Walking away from a crime scene was something that Gibbs hated doing, but as Ducky had said earlier, there was no mystery to solve. There was no bad guy to catch. There was only a deployed father, a mother who smelled of alcohol, and a little boy whose tragic death had hopefully been mercifully painless. Ziva, McGee and Palmer could handle things just fine on their own. 

Just like Ducky, Gibbs was needed somewhere else. 

He shook his head as he crested the hill. No matter how many times the scene replayed in his mind, what had happened made no sense. Tony had gotten too deeply involved in cases before – they all had – but he'd never lost himself so quickly or so completely. That his first thought on waking up and seeing the car was to return to it, that he was convinced Max Booker was still alive, that he had kept trying to pull away from McGee and Palmer to get back to a dead child, it had to mean something. Why didn't he know what that was?

He watched McGee open the back door of the black agency sedan. He stayed where he was, standing on the side of the road and waiting for Ducky to catch up. He was still standing there when Tony settled himself in the back seat and McGee closed the door again.

"Jethro?"

Gibbs didn't turn around. "I have no idea, Duck."

He felt Ducky's hand on his arm, and he looked down at it briefly. "He'll be all right, Jethro," the older man said. "We'll figure it out."

"If you say so."

Gibbs glanced back at the car as McGee and Palmer started back down the hill. He watched them walk away, and he saw the same question in their eyes that he knew was plainly visible on his own face. 

What the hell was wrong with DiNozzo?


End file.
